Making sense of Ukrainian history, let alone its politics, has a never been an easy thing to do, but when history and politics came together in the issue of Holodomor, the matter became utterly...Show moreMaking sense of Ukrainian history, let alone its politics, has a never been an easy thing to do, but when history and politics came together in the issue of Holodomor, the matter became utterly complicated. Known to have been an artificial famine that plagued mainly the southeast of Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1932-1933, Holodomor had emerged at the centre of public debates when the State of Ukraine recognized it as the Ukrainian genocide in 2006. This thesis examines why the understanding of Holodomor transformed into a genocide under President Yushschenko. The famine has always been a controversial issue: it was silenced under the Soviet Union, in the post-Soviet Ukraine it was not much spoken of either. The Ukrainian diaspora, however, deemed it a genocide all along, and awaited its moment to import this matter back into Ukraine. This moment evidently arrived with Yushchenko’s victory in the Orange Revolution. In the following I am trying to understand how the understanding of Holodomor as a genocide manifested itself in Ukraine, and what it meant for the Ukrainian identity. I have approached the issue from three different perspectives: its significance in the reading of first hand accounts of the famine; its popularity with historians and historical narratives; and its role in the political life of Ukraine and nation building. Hereby I have analyzed diaries, historical works, presidential decrees, various secondary literature, many more. Evidently it has become my conclusion that the understanding of Holodomor as a genocide brought little historical significance in the way it was deployed by Ukrainian scholars and members of the diaspora. Instead its “added value” lay with the political claims to a distinct Ukrainian national identity, which had nevertheless failed to prove useful to the Ukrainian public.Show less
